The basic-needs approach to measuring poverty sometimes yields dramatically different results from the World Bank method, depending on the provisioning systems that are in place. This is clear in the case of China, which we explored in a recent paper, and which provides an important example (Sullivan et al., 2023, Sullivan and Hickel, 2023). The World Bank’s method suggests that extreme poverty was very high during the socialist period, and declined during the capitalist reforms of the 1990s, going from 88% in 1981 to zero by 2018. However, the basic-needs approach tells a very different story. From 1981 to 1990, when most of China’s socialist provisioning systems were still in place, extreme poverty in China was on average only 5.6%, much lower than in other large countries of similar GDP/capita (such as India and Indonesia, where poverty was 51% and 36.5% respectively), and lower even than in many middle-income countries (like Brazil and Venezuela, where poverty was 29.5% and 32%, respectively). China’s comparatively strong performance, which is corroborated by data on other social indicators, was due to socialist policies that sought to ensure everyone had access to food and housing at an affordable price. However, during the capitalist reforms of the 1990s, poverty rates rose dramatically, reaching a peak of 68%, as public provisioning systems were dismantled and privatization caused the prices of basic necessities to rise, thus deflating the incomes of the working classes

you're telling me China isn't socialist??

maybe this Hickel guy is just a globalist imperial plant…

It is worth highlighting that the World Bank’s approach to poverty is convenient, from the perspective of capitalism, because it celebrates any increase in any form of production as a “solution” to poverty. Of course, for capital, the primary objective of production is not to meet human needs, or to achieve social progress, but to maximize profit, including by constantly increasing commodity production (Wallerstein, 1996, Wood, 1999).

And the core economies, including Denmark, cannot reasonably be used as a benchmark for development, because they have high levels of excess production and consumption, they dramatically exceed sustainable boundaries, and – as we described in the introduction – they rely on imperialist appropriation.

The UK has a GDP/cap of $38,000 (2011 PPP), representing very high levels of aggregate production and consumption, and yet 4.7 million people in that country do not have secure access to nutritious food (Francis-Devine et al 2023). Despite sustained GDP/cap growth in recent decades, most high-income countries have witnessed an increase in extreme poverty, as measured by the BNPL.

hmm 🤔

abs amazing paper 👏

you da real MVP here

I don't disagree with you, but why, then, did evolution land on making us so damn greedy and selfish?

It literally took 5 seconds to find it

they could have shared nothing at all, other people are often nice enough to search and post a link in the comments

Except a chain email doesn't have random commenters who link to the original or archives of the original

https://archive.is/Fv1u6

and also the necessity of surplus and accidental (necessary) waste:

you need spare parts, and some machines are critical… think of data centres: they often have many spare hard drives on hand to deal with failure, which means that there are more than 100% of the required drives in use… some of the workloads running in that data centre service very important workloads - for example because it’s fresh in everyone’s mind - handing SNAP payments… so what, you redistribute those drives so that we are using all that we have? no we certainly don’t… we eat the inefficiency in the case of redundancy (same argument could apply many more times over when you also think about things like mirrored drives, backups, etc: all of that is under-utilised capacity and “waste”)

the same is true for supermarkets: food that is perishable can’t just be allocated where it’s needed. it exists in a place for a period of time, and you either run out a lot or you have some amount of spoilage… there’s a very hard to hit middle ground with overlapping sell by dates, and overall these days were incredibly good at hitting that already!

… and that’s not to mention the stock on the shelves which is the same thing as spare disk drives!

i guess that’s all distribution on the planet

we could certainly do better, but it’s so much more complex than the fact that these things exist so it must be possible to utilise them 100% efficiently

in Korea it was difficult to get aid to the villages on the front for obvious reasons. so some smartass thought, "if we can't bring the aid to the people, let's bring the people to the aid".

we shouldn't allow a simple problem like logistics get in the way of saving lives.

I fucking wish they'd spend the money on yachts.

At least the yacht sales man would get the billions and use it to buy a house, so the home owner would get the billions and use it buy a car, so the car sales man would get billions and use it buy cocaine, so the drug dealer would get billions and use it buy food.

Billionaires buying yachts would actually feed the poor. But they don't. They just hoard it in their dragon lairs for no good reason.

I guarantee you that 50% of those would go out of their way to defend the interests of the rich assholes

Sadly many people don't have the time money and energy to support a movement.

Most people need support, and don't have much to give.